Chelsea Coates
speaker
69 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Chelsea Coates’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
It sounds lovely, Chelsea, but what's changed on the beaches now?
The main kind of thing that's changing in Barbuda but also across the entire Caribbean is that as these islands are becoming more popular tourist destinations, they're seeing more developers coming in and buying up beachfront property.
Miranda herself has been affected by this.
After Hurricane Irma back in 2017, the whole of Barbuda's population was evacuated from the island to its sister island, Antigua.
and her bar and her house were destroyed.
And she says that this kind of opened the floodgates for lots of offers to people to start offering her money to buy her land.
She rejected all of these offers.
She said that the money isn't what matters to her.
She wants to preserve her bar for her children.
But eventually she told me her bar was bulldozed and she's been locked in a legal fight to gain her land back ever since.
I've spoken to the developers that she claims are occupying her land.
That's the wording that the Global Legal Action Network uses.
That's the network of lawyers that's supporting Miranda.
They said that they are not and have never occupied the land.
And they strictly followed all agreements since entering a lease in Barbuda in 2017.
But she argues, like many other campaigners across the Caribbean, that this is about more than just a source of income or having access to a beach because it's a place to relax or kind of catch a suntan.
For her, it's about her heritage, her culture and her way of life drastically changing and wanting to preserve that for future generations as well.
They are.
So the laws around beachfront ownership, in fact, land ownership generally differ from island to island.
But Barbuda is quite unique in that they have something called communal land ownership.
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